Is Civilization Nothing But A Tax Scheme? If It Is, Do We Want A Refund?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “What is civilization?  Is civilization worth defending?”  Why would someone ask a question like that?  There’s a reason why.  Let’s explore for a moment, shall we?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  “What is civilization?  Is civilization worth defending?”  Why would someone ask a question like that?  There’s a reason why.  Let’s explore for a moment, shall we?  By the way, there are ample ways to get in touch with me.  They’re hardly ever used but there is a phone.  You can call 866-95-PATRIOT.  There is email, which is almost exclusively used to send invective my way.  You can send your hate mail to kingdude@mikechurch.com.  There is the Facebook fan page, which is pretty much used for the same purpose.  That’s fine; that’s wonderful.  I’m happy about that.  You can like that page, Mike Church Show Fan Page.  Then there is the Twitter @TheKingDude, where, again, there are precisely 18 Twitter followers that do not participate in the aforementioned hate mail.

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Is civilization worth defending? Should we aim to conform to it so that we can be considered civilized? Should we aim to bring our children up according to its norms so that they can also be considered civilized? Should we try to make our country and our world as civilized as possible? The chances are that most people will answer in the affirmative to all of these questions. Most people, even in the dark ages in which we live, consider being civilized a good thing. The problem is that most people have no clear understanding of what civilization is or, perhaps as important, what it is not. It might be a good exercise, therefore, to begin to seek a clear definition of the thing to which most of us are happy to subscribe.

What is civilization?

Perhaps the best place to start would be to consult the oracle of oracles, the palantir of all palantiri, by which, of course, I mean Wikipedia. According to this seemingly omniscient cyber-seer, civilization is defined most broadly as “any complex state society characterized by a social hierarchy, symbolic communication forms (typically, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.” Along with this broad definition, Wikipedia adds other key characteristics of civilization as being “urbanization (or the development of cities), centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, specialization of labor, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon agriculture and expansionism.”

At this point, some of us might be questioning whether we still see civilization as something that is good and worth defending. How many of us would fight for civilization if we thought that we were fighting for the increasing complexity of the state and its social hierarchy? How many of the agrarians amongst us would fight for a civilization that defined itself as being separate from the natural environment and as seeking to dominate it? How many of us would fight for incessant urbanization, centralization, and the passive domestication of ourselves alongside the domestication of other organisms? How many of us had realized that being civilized was the willingness to make ourselves cattle in the service of increasingly complex social hierarchies? How many of us thought that civilization was marked by the sort of “specialization of labour” that had reduced human labour to that of a disposable cog in an increasingly large and complex wheel? How many of us guessed that civilization was defined by culturally ingrained progressivism and other supremacist ideologies? How many of us perceived that taxation was civilized and that increasing taxation was therefore and presumably a mark of increasing civilization?

If this is civilization we would be justified in hoping that civilization would go to hell and that, indeed, we would be equally justified in believing that it was all too evidently going there.

We would, however, be wrong to abandon civilization because of such woefully awry definitions of it. A closer look at Wikipedia’s entry on “civilization” will show that the devil is indeed in the detail. We discover, if we scroll down, that “civilization” is described as a concept that has its origins in the Enlightenment. According to Wikipedia, “civilization” is merely an ideological construct of the eighteenth century!

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Mike:  That’s right.  All you’ve got to do is read Ann Coulter or any of the other American exceptionalist, decepticon authors to get that.  All of history began on July the 5^th, 1776.  Anything that happened before that was just backwater, knuckle-dragging Neanderthalism.  Nothing to see here, citizen. Move along.  Our deities, our institutions, our gods were all created on July the 4^th.  Nothing that happened before is even of any significance, I would add to Pearce’s brilliance here.

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It is not a reality in itself but an idea by which an irreligious and irrational “rationalism” can explain and explain away, to its own prejudiced satisfaction, the history of human culture. Amongst those cited by Wikipedia as crucial to the definition of “civilization” are the social Darwinists, on the one side, and the followers of Rousseau, on the other. Civilization is, therefore, defined either by those who advocate a secularist understanding of “progress” or those who call for its rejection through the secularist idealization of so-called noble savagery. Other thinkers are cited to buttress this materialistic understanding of “civilization,” from Spengler to Toynbee, but one will search in vain for the traditional Christian understanding of civilization.

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Mike:  I might just add here: What is this Christian civilization that you speak of?  When and where did that exist?  And if it did exist, what happened to it?  Where did it go?  Where did the people that might have called themselves these Christians, where did they go?  Where are they hiding at?  Oh, that’s right, they’re watching Robin Williams videos of Williams bashing the Pope, the Vatican, and priests who hear confession.  That’s where they went.  Bravo.  What do you people do for encores around here, I might ask?  Not sure I want to be around when you do it and the lightning bolts start hitting.

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Having seen how civilization is defined on the internet (the one Thing to rule them all and in the darkness bind them), let us distinguish between such a definition and the Christian understanding of what it is to be civilized.

True civilization is a culture animated by the transcendental trinity of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The authentic presence of goodness is love and its manifestation in virtue; the authentic presence of truth is to be seen in the culture’s conformity to reason, properly understood as an engagement with the objective reality beyond the confines of egocentric subjectivism . . .

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Mike:  That’s a big passage there, but what he basically means is that reason can guide us if we leave our egos on the side.  If you don’t leave your ego on the side, then you can subjectively make your way through almost any problem, and, regardless of what anyone in history, whether he was man or God, told you about what is good or what is bad, you can subjectively make anything good.  I’ve heard some of you people out there subjectively make murder a positive thing.  We won’t get into that today but we will on another day perhaps.

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. . . the authentic presence of the beautiful is a reverence for the beauty of Creation and creativity . . .

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Mike:  Well, what’s that?  There was no creation, Mr. Pearce, there was just a blob of dust and boom, a big bang, we’re told.  That’s what happened, man, a bang, a big bang, blam, kablowee, and then we appeared like magic.  No, it can’t be magic.  So what is this beautiful, this creation that you speak of?

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. . . the beauty of Creation and creativity properly perceived in the outpouring of gratitude which is the fruit of humility. [Mike: Again, what is this humility of which we speak?] A society informed and animated by such a culture is truly civilized. [Mike: I’d like to find that society somewhere. I can find small parts of it on certain given Sundays in certain places.]

A civilized man is not animated by a desire to shape himself into an image of his “self,” which is itself unknowable, [Mike: That depends, Mr. Pearce on what parlor you get your ink from and who it is that did your rings. You’re not thinking this through properly, Mr. Pearce.] but is willing to allow himself to be shaped into an image of the perfect Person beyond himself. Responding to Christ’s Trinitarian description of Himself as the Way, the Truth and the Life, a civilized man surrenders himself to the Way of Virtue (Love), the Truth of Reason, and the Life of Grace (Beauty). [Mike: Who is this grace figure that you refer to, sir?] In short and in sum, civilization manifests itself in the conforming of the will of Man to the will of the Giver of all goodness, truth and beauty.

What is civilization? It is the conforming of the heart of humanity to the Heart of Christ. All other definitions of civilization are not only wrong but are ultimately uncivilized!

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End Mike Church Show Transcript